CH654

It was after the first half hour that both Thera and Yuzu had to admit that whatever was wrong with him, they couldn’t solve it. Thera could find no issue in his body and while Yuzu claimed there seemed to be something going on in his soul, it wasn’t enough for a proper answer, nor for her to know how they could possibly fix it. All they knew was that whatever the matter was, Ben had chosen to pull out the archive to use, they could only trust that it would somehow help as time went on.

“So like, is there anything we can do instead of just waiting?” Jake finally asked an hour after the two women had given up. “Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, do anything?”

“It’s hard to get a solution when you don’t know the problem,” Elvat said from the side. “If it seems like he’s doing something about it then trust him, it hasn’t been that long.”

“No, it’s been impossibly long,” Thera muttered as she stared at him. “Using the archive speeds up how fast he thinks by a hundred times over and I don’t even know how fast he can usually do it with his thought speed skill. For us, it’s been over an hour, for him it has to have been weeks at least.”

“Okay, so again, that sounds bad so what do we do?”

“I don’t-”

Her words were cut off as Ben dropped the book and opened his eyes, groaning as he did.

“Okay, that sucked. Every part of that sucked. And I now have even more complaints for Nare about the accuracy of the statement that the system can’t hurt you. If that’s the case then why do I keep stumbling into all of this crappy painful harm? I mean, it’s at least a little interesting that I forced a skill transition, but-”

This time it was Thera cutting him off as she reached out and squeezed him tight before pulling him away to look into his eyes as the rest watched on.

“Ben, what the hell just happened?”

“Long story short, the system just drove me insane. Not to worry though, I got better.”

“You are giving me the long version whether you like it or not.”

“Okay, the slightly longer version is that the last job awakened alien thought structure in a way that I think caused my minds to take on the traits of everything I ever connected to. This was, to put it mildly, not ideal and briefly left me struggling to figure out how to use my body when it felt like I should have had more legs or arms or flippers or tentacles or whatever. To try and fix it I went into the archive for way, way too long and very carefully broke my brain in a different way, driving me sane again. And now I’m probably fine.”

“Not one part of that sounds fine!”

“Wait,” Jake cut in, looking far too interested now that it seemed Ben was stable. “So what happened then? You said the skill transitioned so that can’t be the end of it.”

“Ah, I took all of the non-human aspects from the human parts of my thoughts and well, combined them I guess into separate threads so instead of contaminating the full structure of my thoughts they’re just sort of acting as a different way of thinking in each of my minds. Like I said, I’m probably fine.”

“That still doesn’t sound fine,” Amy muttered while Jake just looked more interested.

“Wait, you’ve connected to me before, does that mean there’s a copy of me living in your head? Can he hear me? Hello inner Jake!”

“There’s not, thank god. Whatever happened to me didn’t copy minds into me whole cloth, only replicated some of the structure from races and species that differed greatly enough from my own. It’s probably fine.”

“And you’re still you?” Thera asked him, looking into his eyes as he smiled back.

“Always am.”

“Alright then, if you say it’s fine then it is.”

It seemed the others were less sure of that fact but what mattered was that he was at least mostly confident in it. Already when he was looking at the world he felt those new aspects of himself viewing it in different ways than he normally would but those aspects were now just as much him as anything else, they didn’t change the core of who he was.

Although I think I’m going to avoid mind jobs in the future, why are they always the ones trying to break me? At least this wasn’t as bad as some in the past… No, if I didn’t have my unnatural thought speed and the archive I would have been spending weeks, maybe even months on this. That is factually not good. No more mind jobs from here on out.

…Unless one seems really really good.

Ignoring the small part of himself that was already trying to weasel out of the personal promise he’d just made, Ben instead focused back on the others with him, giving away none of his thoughts as he spoke up.

“Okay, well now that that bit of awkwardness is over with, who’s ready to move on to their next job?”

“You can’t be serious,” Steph sighed. “Really? After you were just convulsing on the ground like that?”

“I’m not taking another mind job for the next one, it will be fine.”

“I wonder if anyone here actually believes that,” Will muttered, again with far too many in the room looking like they agreed.

“Guys, listen, I’m taking these next jobs with or without you so you can either tag along and enjoy the easy experience or you can watch me enjoy it all by myself. Your call.”

The fact that he was still going to be doing it either way made things easier for them, even if they didn’t seem to like that fact as they organized who would be in the next party, switching out who had to miss that time as Ben decided which of the two he was looking at he wanted to take first before ultimately ending on his newest option.

“I’ll take soul user.”

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